April 16-18, 2001 — Skateboards and razorblades

Arriving back from Ottawa to a room that would be empty for a week meant a few things:

1. I could play as much Joy Division and New Order as I wanted.
2. I could stay up late without having to work in the dark.
3. I could use the washroom with (get this!) the door open.

The pleasure I found in all this was a lot less intense than you might imagine. The first damper on my enthusiasm was the mysterious disappearance of my Joy Division box set. Then, while sitting around at 2:00 am using the Internet, I realized that I quite like working in the dark. And, well, that bit about the washroom certainly isn't anything to write home about. So the week was looking down.

But this negativity couldn't last with packages such as these arriving in the mail:

There's something about a stack of 12" promotional singles that can brighten any day.

With my mood already much improved, Jeff returned from Oshawa with skateboard parts, and within minutes my Dashboard Confessional pro-model was good to go:

(I had considered including a joke in the previous paragraph that involved calling my skateboard a "'Dash' board." I'm trying to decide whether I'm a better or worse person for omitting said joke...)

My first skateboarding experiences were a bit disappointing. Not only did I not fall and break my wrists, but I've also been completely unable to get my skateboard off of the ground. It's a sad state of affairs.

I'm not quite sure what the order of events was, but at some point after my day of records and skateboards I found myself in a LCBO -- the Liquor Control Board of Ontario? Something like that? A distributor of alcoholic beverages, at any rate -- with Jeff. Despite my lack of interest in buying anything, I rated the drinks that I saw based on colour and packaging to decide which ones I would drink if I, y'know, drank. My interest in neat-looking bottles and colourful drinks led to Jeff assessing my choices as mostly being for infants or seniors. He, on the other hand, chose to get 1.5 liters of Hochtaler, "a light, medium dry wine made in the German style." I still think that neon-blue drinks in squeeze bottles with 3% alcohol are just as tough...

So Jeff drank his Hochtaler and I used the Internet and a good time was had by all. Or at least such is the party line.

Actually, it wasn't even the party line -- it was pretty widely acknowledged that there were far better ways that we could've been spending our time. But what's one more wasted night?

With my first real skateboard now assembled and with my first real tour of a liquor store behind me, I decided the next day that it was time to become a man and to shave for the first time. With a razor and shaving cream, that is.

I've pretty much always used an electric razor, and when I found free shaving cream and razors in the "Exam Survival Kit" that the University of Toronto had been nice enough to put together for me, I figured I'd run out of excuses as far as avoiding shaving with a razor went. I carefully read the instructions on both products and monopolized the washroom for a solid half hour trying to shave properly. And I'm not going to lie to you: it was an immensely disappointing experience. Maybe I'm an idiot and I was doing it completely wrong, but it never looked like there was a trick to it when I saw others shaving. I decided halfway through that the pain wasn't worth it, so I proceeded to dry my face and to finish shaving with my electric razor.

And that, in no particular order, was Monday through to Wednesday. Needless to say, no attempts at studying were made. Thursday, Friday, Saturday, Erika, and even less studying await...